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0 pointswmeredith4mo ago0 comments

Thank you for calling this out. As a long time console gamer, I hadn't noticed this creeping bloat until I started playing games with my young children. My son begged for a new Madden game after playing it at his friend's house.

When we got the game, it probably took us an hour of fucking around with downloads and accounts. Off the top of my head, I had to set up a parents EA account and kids account, set permissions, had to make my 7 year old an email address, had to set up two factor authentication, accept crazy terms of use, verify emails, etc.) And then once we got all that done we're dodging ads for in game points, coins, cards, card packs, cosmetics, pre-order bonuses, etc. to get to the actual game. It's so SO bad and just not fun.

It completely killed his enthusiasm for the game. My son wandered off multiple times during this process. When I joked with my wife that we could have built a PC in the time it took us to do this bullshit it was an exaggeration, but only a little.

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array_key_first4mo ago

I had this experience playing couch co-op call of duty a few years ago. I had to make a fucking account. It's not even my console.

Nintendo has wavered a tad, but they're the closet to the original experience. You pop in a thingy, hook up another controller, or two, or three, and you're off. It just works, maybe you can input a name for your guy, maybe not, maybe you just always play Waluigi so everyone knows who you are.

bzzzt4mo ago

Nintendo is also becoming worse. Some Switch 2 games are so big you need to juggle with the internal storage and expansion SD express cards above 256Gb are simply unobtainable or priced outrageously. While you can obviously delete and redownload titles that takes a while and it's a shame the console storage can be completely filled with 4 AAA titles. That in combination with 'key carts' that are just a download key and still require internal storage has put a big brake on my game collection ambitions for the time being.

andrekandre4mo ago

  > I had to make a fucking account.

ea games are like this, same for ubisoft... in my case i just disconnect my switch 2 from wifi and they don't bother about it (much anyways).

i wish console makers would be a bit more strict with policies like this cause as you indicate, it hurts whole usecase of consoles in the first place

bickeringyokel4mo ago

Had to do the same with halo infinite at my friends house, tried to use some burner emails and it kept banning our 2nd player within a few minutes. Gotta love the digital future.

layla5alive4mo ago

This is so very sad and so very ripe for disruption.

So many of the top players in our modern late stage capitalism economy fit this mold of having a terrible user experience with a large unsatisfied user base. Usually it's not even a monopoly, but all the top players are roughly equally awful to their users.

I'm tempted to start some companies to just do the thing in a way that doesn't suck for the actual paying customers. I think just doing a good/competent/user-needs-centric job at the same basic product would be enough to disrupt the market in many cases.

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